`Desperate' husband secretive about show

Mark Moses seems like a regular guy. He coaches his young sons' soccer and baseball teams, he speaks adoringly of his wife of 16 years, and he sure likes to laugh.

Then why does a woman interrupt his lunch at the Aroma Cafe in Studio City to belt out, "You're a murdering S.O.B."?

Perhaps it's because Moses has quickly become Public Enemy No. 1 in the minds of some TV viewers.

To them, he's Paul Young, the "Desperate Housewives" husband who dug out his swimming pool in the middle of the night after his wife ceremoniously killed herself in the pilot, set a toy chest afloat with "grisly remains" in a lake and committed his adolescent son to a psychiatric ward, where he ordered doctors to "forget the Freud and stick with the drugs."

He put his house up for sale, hired a hit man, and in his final act on the Nov. 28 episode, struck a meddlesome neighbor, Martha Huber, on the head with a blender and strangled her to death.

She had it coming, Moses explains over lunch, defending his on-screen alter ego. "She should have returned what she borrowed."

Paul Young, you see, killed his nosy neighbor with the blender she had borrowed from his wife, Mary Alice, but never returned. Not only was she presumably blackmailing Mary Alice, she didn't have the decency to return the appliance after she discovered Mary Alice's dead body in the pilot episode. In fact, Martha removed the label with Mary Alice's name. The nerve!

As one of the only male characters with his own story line, he is at the center of intrigue. Why did Mary Alice kill herself? Why was she being blackmailed? What "awful things" could her 16-year-old son, Zach, be remembering? Who was buried in that pool and toy chest? Who is Dana?

"The character of Paul Young is very misunderstood," says Marc Cherry, creator of "Desperate Housewives." "He's basically a nice guy who's been put in a horrible circumstance."

But would you want to have him as a father? Paul and Zach Young could easily win the award, if there was one, for television's creepiest father and son.

If you're feeling sorry for Zach, who is grieving for his mother, "You won't later!" says Cody Kasch, the 17-year-old who plays him.

On this December afternoon, Moses and Kasch are re-shooting a dinner scene for the Dec. 19 episode. When they shot it the first time a month ago, Paul Young revealed a big secret. Cherry has now decided to hang on to the juicy stuff for three more episodes.

Moses claims the show's mysteries are shared with him on a need-to-know basis by the writers. But he was clever enough to figure out early that Martha Huber was the blackmailer, although he had never imagined Paul would kill her with his own bare hands. After all, he had already paid a hit man $10,000. As for other mysteries, "I have a lot of theories," he says, his voice deepening.

OK, let's hear them.

What is wrong with your son? "Nothing outside of normal teenage behavior. If you give him the correct dosage of drugs, he's usually fine."

Does Paul know why Mary Alice killed herself? "Not really. That's what's so frustrating about it. But now there is a clue. He thinks she killed herself because she was blackmailed by Mrs. Huber. Paul knows whether or not Mrs. Huber is correct in her assumption about Mary Alice. I know that much, and I can't give it away."

Paul, Moses assures, is not a bad guy. He misses his wife. Really. So is it fair for someone to accost the actor and call him a murderer?